Posts by Joe Wylie
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and e e is one of my linguistic heroes-
Also, along with Ernest Hemingway and Walt Disney, one of the notable American ambulance drivers of WW1.
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Further to the shark warning sign example, I once read an account of the difficulties faced by surf lifesavers in getting people to swim between the flags on Auckland's West Coast beaches. A lifesaver approached a group who were about to enter the area of a dangerous rip, and suggested that they swim between the flags. One of their number lost it, angrily protesting that, as he happened to be a cyclist and took so much stick from motorists, he wasn't about to take orders from a lifeguard, and he'd swim where he pleased.
Bloody cyclists. At least you can argue with pedants.
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The Unicode + Alt-X thing doesn't seem to work here on PAS, so I've been copypasting to get the examples in the paragraph above. I assume that's what everyone else did above - or is there a trick I don't know?
I guess if you use a Māc you're a bit of a softy anyway (not that I'm suggesting for a moment that you do), but I use the real softie's Māc method:
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So there's these two sharks at a crowded beach, checking out the bathers. One say's to the other "Let's rub them out like a De Kooning".
"What, all of them?" says his pal.
"Nah", says the first shark, "just the art casualties. Remember, we're doing this for Damian Hirst". -
When you think of how much of 2000AD's output was basically violence-porn, what Alan Moore managed to do with The Ballad of Halo Jones was pretty special.
For me the excellent Halo Jones is the best Moore ever did. Never could warm in the same way to Watchmen or Extraordinary Gentleman. Pedestrian artwork (Ozymandias / Adrian Veidt is a bloody awful design) and too much pretension to 'meaning', IMveryHO. As Kracklite so rightly noted, Moore picked up from Moorcock, just as Neil Gaiman picked up from Moore.
For all its violence porn, 2000AD was a quantum improvement on stuff like Valiant. Anyone remember the uber-creepy Janus Stark, a strip with, apart from a few incidentals, absolutely zero female characters?
And Asterix, charming little bugger that he is, would have to be one of the biggest xenophobes in comics. Is there an adventure where he doesn't say "How peculiar these foreigners are" at least once?
Thanks Craig for the memory jog on The Trigan Empire. I'd quite forgotten what a labour of love that strip was.
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Uh, my bad - Mellel does save in Word's .doc format. It's just a feature I barely ever use.
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I've heard of Mellel but never tried it. What's its appeal to you, Joe?
I'm not a technical writer, and as I'm no longer studying a lot of Mellel's features such as footnotes and integration with the Bookends bibliography and reference app. aren't so critical any more. That said, there isn't any internal Word feature I can think of that Mellel can't match or better. Reads Word files reasonably well, but of course won't save in that format. The proprietary file format isn't a problem when you're largely writing to please yourself.
Mainly, it's fairly cheap, and I'm a sucker for a nice interface. Nothing I've used displays a closer approximation of the final printed page than Mellel.
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What is the best alternative? Might it be Open Office...
For those occasions when I must be perfectly dressed for the darkside I have Word for Windows running in Win XP in Parallels Desktop (Intel Mac).
Otherwise it's the slightly idiosyncratic but otherwise v. nice Mellel. -
I am afraid the belief that Word is a suitable original format for a structured document is the taproot of a mighty tree of frustration. Word is a tarpit for documents; once they get into Word, they can never come out without needing a great deal of painstaking cleanup.
Amen. Create a document in Word for Mac. After saving, run Word's own arcane 'compatibility check'. Mail document to a Windows user. Something's sure to be screwy about at least the formatting when - or if - they can open it.
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. . . if they're really bored, they can set about sorting all those back issues of 2000AD into chronological order.
The Brotherhood of Trash makes it to another generation.